“Fear is the mind-killer…”; Frank Herbert hit on a deep insight there. Fear is our most primal motivator, absolutely nothing comes close. It drives our pattern processing capability – if we are in a situation that doesn’t fit a known pattern, fear puts us on edge. Fear primes the fight or flight response. To live with no fear would be non-surviving behavior – being oblivious to danger when danger is near. Living in constant fear also is non-surviving behavior – too much energy expended for no benefit. We are the product of tens of thousands of generations of survival behavior – buried in our genetic and psychic inheritance.

We fear the unknown, with death being the greatest unknown.  The irony being, we’ve known for countless millennia that death is the single most certain thing in this life.  Though we generally prefer certainty to uncertainty (and I will touch on this again), not so much in this case.  It is fear of death, or the less pessimistic take – desire to live, that is the main motivation of life.  All life has the ‘desire’ to survive, even if lacking the awareness of that or the ultimate fate of death.  We cheat oblivion by spiritual means (a uniquely human thing) and/or propagation of our genes (as common to nearly all life).

We have of course evolved a great deal in the last 100,000 years (let alone say the preceding 1,000,000+ years). The fascist metaphor somewhat fits – we are weaker individually than we are collectively, thus our social evolution into larger, more sophisticated social groups in that time. That isn’t always comfortable because our inheritance, our deep behavior, was ingrained under different circumstances.  And deepest of all lies fear, too ready to leap forward and push aside all other mental processes.  Because of this, we are susceptible to manipulation by someone playing on our fear, just as we would reasonably be in fear of a credible threat of violence (intentional or not) directed at us.  Fear is the lever that moves humans whether subtle or overt.

In the last 10,000 years we reach back to where history morphs into mythology.  In the last 1,000 years we have roughly the modern world, and yet how few of us can actually trace our personal history (ancestry) back that far?  Even our personal history becomes mythological in that time frame.  What is remarkable is how different for most people the world today is from what is was 1,000 years ago.  It is a real effort to find cultures that haven’t radically altered.  Yet how different are we from the people of 1,000 years ago – as much as from those 10,000 years ago? 100,000 years?  I tend to believe the veneer of our civility doesn’t run all that deep, and given the barbarism (primarily in Europe) of only 80-110 years back, we can be stripped down to an ugly human form far more easily than it is comfortable to contemplate.  If that doesn’t send a small frisson of fear down your neck, you may be the master of your own fears.

I will posit that all social effort (i.e. between two or more people) can be defined as operating under one of only two conditions: cooperation (wherein the parties are voluntarily participating) or coercion (where at least one participant is engaged under some threat of force).  The action of fear in coercion is obvious – punishment, up to death, for non-compliance.  Fear in cooperation isn’t so obvious, but that doesn’t mean it is never in play.  So social effort is built on what motivates all the individuals in the social organization, and while fear may feature in motivation, outside of coercion it isn’t the main factor.  Motivation thus becomes a more refined thing where relative comfort, status and many other elements can rise to prominence in why an individual is moved to act.

The next interesting thing to consider about social effort is the group will have a leader or leaders, and followers.  Scale it up, scale it down, that fundamental won’t change.  Leadership may be temporary or life-long but there will never be no leadership because the followers can’t tolerate that.  They can tolerate bad leadership but not a leadership void – it is the social equivalent of nature abhorring a vacuum.  You may or may not have other hierarchies, but you will have this division.  I tend to suspect (from the little I’ve delved into it) this may be the root cause of failure in anarchist theory – being out of accord with a human fundamental.  Anarchists are people that are by natural inclination leaders even if they don’t want to be followed, because even more so they don’t want to be led.  The humans that constitute the masses (or the public if you prefer) are precisely those who do want to follow.  I won’t restate Hoffer here, but I will take him as reasonably authoritative toward this point.  So any theory of governance, or of business or other organization, that doesn’t account for this is fundamentally flawed.

Leadership exercises power, setting the course for the organization (up to and including government) and putting the tasks and performers into place.  Power in a cooperative effort usually isn’t terribly threatening to the followers, typically facing the loss of compensation or some status for poor performance (excommunication maybe being the one that threatens the most dire consequences).  Naturally, power in a coercive situation is an entirely different beast.  Which isn’t to say that power under coercion is the only time that power will be abused.  Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite and countless others have proven that sufficiently charismatic persuasion can be as fatal as the commands of a Stalin or a Pharaoh.  So given that leadership is unavoidable, so too is some employment of power.  The inevitable problem is power attracts the worst kind of people – the very ones that should never have any degree of power.  Plato’s notion [conceit?] of a philosopher-king is that a philosophic mind is indifferent to power and thus most suited to using it and less likely to abuse it.  Despite some leaders pretensions, this hasn’t even been an unusual condition; it is a theoretical one only.

Alright, so where does this leave us.  I would say that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau (and consequently none that trace back to either) have natural man at all right.  We are neither under constant assault from all other humans, nor under such casual interaction that no other human was ever a threat.  We are social creatures from our earliest development, but we aren’t ants or bees.  We value our own life enough to accept conditions of living under duress, e.g. slavery, when we would escape such if given the opportunity.  The overwhelming majority of our social behavior is dictated by cooperation not coercion, and yet we can’t abandon coercion entirely.  We still operate with a fear sensitivity not appropriate to our social environment – not even of the last 100 years let alone the last 1,000.  We are, individually and collectively, too easily frightened; and once in that state, too susceptible to manipulation by leaders – who probably shouldn’t be leading given their desire to have and use power.  If that sounds like a mess I would say that is because it is one.

Which brings me back to the point I skipped over earlier of our desire for certainty over uncertainty.  That is the Sirens’ call and may be part of what engenders followership in us.  When presented with some thing that provides certainty, we no longer really have to think about that thing and let’s be honest, that comes as a relief.  Maybe the thing that is hardest of all about science is accepting that you are wrong about a thing that you were sure you knew as a certainty.  The discipline of scientific thinking is a challenge even for the most dedicated scientist – because it cuts against our underlying human desire.  Kuhn wasn’t wrong about how tightly scientists will cling to a theory, particularly if they have made a significant contribution to it.  If the most disciplined thinking available to human beings still suffers from the foibles of human desires/motivations, how broken might be all of our other thinking.  How convenient do various certainties become?  From certainties, dogmas arise and dissent becomes heresy or treason.  What I described in the preceding paragraph was a world saturated in uncertainty, and we don’t like it.  What do we do?